What gets scanted is “photography literacy,” the ability to understand, analyze, and have a critical relationship to still photographs of any kind, perhaps most importantly those one did not make oneself — the grounding necessary to “read” those images, valued as the visual equivalent of reading comprehension in relation to written texts not of one’s own devising. […]
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From my outsider’s perspective, the visual literacy movement has possibly missed an important boat by failing to recognize the relevance, significance, and longevity of the K-12 photo-education movement, and by not encouraging or even undertaking the creation of an annotated history thereof. […] We are the “illiterates of the future” Moholy warned us about; and our children will be the illiterates of an even more hopeless future unless we transcend our current fantasies about photography education and align them at last with the higher realities of our time and place. […] What Coleman did for us, and certainly for myself as a future photo educator and curator, was to instruct us by example never to ignore the forces that propel the visibility and inclusion of certain photographers over others. […] These artifacts are not intended to engage the discourse of art or creativity on any level whatsoever. No meaningful gauge can be applied to them; since they take no risks by which they could be considered failures, it is impossible for them to succeed. […] |
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